LANG, Andrew; Ford, H.J.; Sangorski & Sutcliffe

[Complete Set of the Fairy Books, A]

London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889. Item #06430

A Complete First Edition Set of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books
Uniformly 'Harlequin' Bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

[LANG, Andrew, editor]. The Blue Fairy Book. [Together with:] The Red Fairy Book. [And:] The Green Fairy Book. [And:] The Yellow Fairy Book. [And:] The Pink Fairy Book. [And:] The Grey Fairy Book. [And:] The Violet Fairy Book. [And:] The Crimson Fairy Book. [And:] The Brown Fairy Book. [And:] The Orange Fairy Book. [And:] The Olive Fairy Book. [And:] The Lilac Fairy Book. Edited by Andrew Lang. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889-1910.

First editions. Together twelve small octavo volumes (6 15/16 x 4 3/4 inches; 176 x 121 mm.). Complete with half-titles. With numerous illustrations by H.J. Ford, J.P. Jacomb Hood, and Lancelot Speed, including color plates in The Violet Fairy Book, The Crimson Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, The Olive Fairy Book, and The Lilac Fairy Book.

Bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe (stamp-signed on the verso of the front free endpaper) in three-quarter harlequin morocco over cloth boards, each book being bound in the corresponding color to its title. Spines decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, top edge gilt, “Cockerell” marbled endpapers. The Lilac Fairy Book spine slightly faded and with a previous owner’s ink presentation inscription, dated “Oct. 18th. 1910,” on a front flyleaf. A few spines very slightly faded, still a very fine and attractive set. Complete sets of the “Fairy Books” are very scarce.

“Andrew Lang [1844-1912] was a Scottish scholar who carried on a tireless research in the field of folklore. His ‘coloured’ fairy books have been popular with boys and girls since their first appearance” (Osborne Collection I, pp. 34-36, and II, p. 604).

Literary & Cultural Importance:
Edited by Andrew Lang, the Fairy Books represent the most influential English-language fairy-tale anthology of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Lang was not merely a compiler but a scholar-editor: he curated, commissioned translations, reshaped oral and literary traditions, and framed them with scholarly yet child-friendly introductions.
The series introduced generations of English-speaking readers to a pan-European and global folklore canon, drawing from French, German, Scandinavian, Scottish, Arabic, Classical Greek, and Eastern sources. Many tales appeared for the first time in English, or in newly adapted forms that became canonical in their own right.

Illustration & Design:
Illustrators H. J. Ford, Lancelot Speed, and J. P. Jacomb Hood defined the visual language of fairy tales for the Anglo-Victorian imagination. Ford’s illustrations in particular are now regarded as foundational to later fantasy art, influencing illustrators from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac.
Later volumes introduced color plates, marking a shift from purely decorative illustration to luxury gift-book production, making complete, uniform first-edition sets especially elusive.

The Fairy Books were “a series of anthologies of fairy stories, beginning with The Blue Fairy Book, which were compiled for children by Andrew Lang between 1889 and 1910. They put both well known and obscure tales (some of them recently collected and never before printed) into a form that was accessible and attractive. The books became classics in their own right, and have endured in print with comparatively little alteration. The books were published by Longmans, for whom Lang was literary adviser, and at first Lang had no intention of there being a series; in the introduction to the second volume (The Red Fairy Book, 1890) he implied that the best stories had already been taken for the first book, and he called the third (Green, 1892) ‘probably the last’. However, the series met with such popularity that it finally stretched to 12 fairy books of different colours…For each of the books Lang himself selected the tales, commissioned necessary translations or adaptations, and wrote a preface…The first of the series, The Blue Fairy Book (1889), contained 37 tales, among them almost all the ‘classic’ fairy stories—the best known tales from Perrault, Mme d’Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights, and Grimm. Lang also included Dick Whittington and Jack the Giant Killer from English tradition, and selected from the Cabinet des fées, Chambers’s Popular Traditions of Scotland, and Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collection of Norwegian stories. Rather oddly, he also commissioned an abridgement of the voyage to Lilliput from Gulliver’s Travels to be done for the book. He himself made an adaptation from Greek mythology, the story of Perseus and the Gorgon; but he gave it the title ‘The Terrible Head’ and used no proper names in it, so that it would resemble the folk-tales from which he believed it sprang rather than a classical tale of literary association. After this first volume, however, the scope of the anthologies was more clearly defined, and materials of these types were excluded” (The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature).

Price: $10,500.00